by Rasma Haidri
Perched on the porch railing,
my daughter watches night rise over the Pacific,
as if sun and moon exchanging light
is a tv drama.
Oh! Look! Come quick!
I’ve never seen it like this!
I stay doing dishes, watching her silhouette
become granular mist beyond the dark screen.
Later, she comes inside, saying
I’m surprised you let me do that!
Does she think I want her help
in the kitchen?
No–she thought I’d be afraid
of her falling. It hadn’t crossed my mind,
but she, at twelve-and-a-half,
has felt the pull, contemplated
the fall three feet backward to the floor,
or thirty forward to the ground.
Either way, I’d get hurt! she chirps,
bouncing past on tiptoes, her ponytail
no longer starlight trails—but a thing,
solid—of her body—hers.
She returns the next night,
(each night from now on)
to swoon between ocean and sky,
the sprawling dark, the plunging sun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rasma Haidri grew up in Tennessee and lived in Hawaii before making her home on a Norwegian seacoast island. She is the author of the poetry collection As If Anything Can Happen and three textbooks. She holds a M.Sc. in education and is a current MFA candidate at UBC in Vancouver. Her writing has received the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters & Science poetry award, a Best of Net nomination and the Southern Women Writers Association award in creative non-fiction, among other recognitions. Her poems and essays as have appeared in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review and Fourth Genre, among other journals, and been anthologized in the U.S., U.A.E, U.K., Canada, India, Hong Kong, Israel and Norway.